1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an electronic mail program. More particularly, the invention relates to an electronic mail program having modular integral authoring/reading applications whereby documents created with the modular integral authoring/reading applications are seamlessly sent and received by the mail program and which provides different kinds of interactivity with and different kinds of access to electronic mail messages depending on user types or roles.
2. State of the Art
In recent years electronic mail (“email”) has become widely used in business, education, and in personal communications. One of the features of electronic mail which is most convenient, particularly in business and in education, is the ability to attach a binary computer file to an email message. This feature enables email correspondents to rapidly share word processing documents, database documents, spreadsheet documents, multimedia documents, or virtually any kind of binary file created by a computer. There are, however, some serious limitations and inconveniences associated with attaching a binary file to an email message.
The original Internet mail system as defined in 1982 with RFC (Request for Comments) 821 and 822 had a number of important limitations. In particular, the system was not designed to carry large quantities of arbitrary data in an email message. In fact, the 1982 SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) standard required that an email message consist of a single message containing only ASCII characters in lines of 1000 characters (blocks of 32k) or less. Moreover, some implementations of SMTP or other mail transport systems (such as UUCP) restricted message lengths to some allowed maximum number of bytes. Lengthy messages passing through a mail gateway using one of these implementations were likely to be truncated.
The ability to send large quantities of binary data through the Internet electronic mail system was made possible with the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard for Internet messages. The original MIME standard was published as an Internet Request For Comments document (RFC. 1341) and approved in June of 1992. (See Internet RFCs 2045, 2046, and 2047 for the latest MIME standards documents.) The MIME standard describes how an email message should be formatted in order to be considered MIME compliant. MIME defines a set of message header fields and a set of message encoding standards that are designed to overcome the limitations of RFC 822 message formats and still be transportable through any of the numerous legacy mail transport systems in use on the Internet. MIME message header fields extend those defined in RFC 822 and describe the content and encoding type of the email message. Encoding schemes allowed in the MIME standard include “quoted-printable”, and “base64”. In addition, three unencoded data types are allowed. These are labeled “8 bit”, “7 bit”, or “binary”.
If the sender and the receiver of the email message with the attached binary file are using the same brand and version of email program and both programs are configured in substantially the same way, the receiver's email program should automatically apply the appropriate decoding to the attached binary file and produce a file which is identical to the file which was attached to the email by the sender. However, if the sender and receiver are using different email programs, the recipient may receive a file which must be decoded by the recipient using a separate decoding program.
Even after the file is properly received and decoded, it is often difficult for the receiver of the file to open the file. The receiver of the file might expect that “clicking” on the file icon will open the file. However, clicking on the file icon will often not open the file. It may result in an error message like “application not found” or, worse, it may result in the file being opened by an inappropriate application thereby displaying “gibberish”. The receiver of the file must have a program capable of reading (opening) the file. For example, if one attaches a spreadsheet file to an email message, the receiver of the file must have a spreadsheet program in order to open the file. Technically, it is not necessary that the receiver of the file have the same brand program as that which created the file. However, opening a file with a program which did not create it, though possible, can be very inconvenient. The receiver of the file must know what kind of file is attached to the email message, must know what program on their computer is capable of reading that type of file, must launch the program, must open the file from within the program, and wait while the program translates the file.
The limitations of Internet electronic mail can become even more frustrating if the sender and recipient are not using the same operating system (OS). Some mail attachment encoding schemes (and file compression schemes) are OS-dependent and it is possible that an email recipient could receive a file which is impossible to decode (or decompress).
These limitations in electronic mail have discouraged many people, particularly non-sophisticated computer users, from attaching files to electronic mail messages. In fact, for some novice users, the task of launching one application to create a document, saving the document, launching a separate email application to create an email message, and then locating the saved document for attachment to an email message is daunting enough to discourage them. In addition, novice users often complain that after “downloading” a file attached to an email message they cannot find the file on their hard disk.
Another interesting aspect of electronic mail is that it is now widely used in electronic commerce, but only in a very limited way. Electronic mail is used by vendors to advertise goods and such electronic mail may typically include a hyperlink which, if clicked on, will cause the mail recipient's computer to launch a web browser and connect to the vendor's website where the goods may be purchased. Electronic mail is also used by online vendors to provide customer support by answering questions sent to the vendor via electronic mail and to confirm online purchases by sending electronic mail to the purchaser.
My previously incorporated parent application discloses electronic mail software which includes a main email component and a number of installable components. The installable components include authoring/reading components for creating/reading different kinds of documents and mailbox components for listing different kinds of messages or for listing messages in different styles. The main email component provides an underlying graphical user interface for functions directly associated with the storage and transfer of electronic mail messages, and also handles all data bundling and unbundling required to transform a message created by an authoring component into a MIME compliant message. The authoring/reading components act like applications embedded within the email program and allow specific types of documents such as spreadsheets, graphics, databases, etc. to be created from within the email program and emailed directly. The authoring/reading components also allow received documents to be read without the difficulties traditionally associated with attaching binary files to an email letter. The authoring components of the invention pass data to the main email component which packages the data as a MIME compliant message. When the message is received, the main email component concatenates (as needed) and decodes the MIME message and sends the data to the authoring/reading component associated with the MIME type. The electronic mail software also includes modular integrated authoring/reading software wherein the functionality of the authoring/reading software is controlled by the “role” of the user when participating in an exchange of messages. One example of “roles” given in the parent application was that of teacher and student. Another example was that of a puzzle encoder and a puzzle decoder.
It is believed that the enhanced electronic mail software disclosed in my previously incorporated parent application may be even further enhanced to provide more functionality regarding the use of “roles” in the contexts of electronic commerce, healthcare, business, and law, as well as in education.
Recently, the email client OUTLOOK by MICROSOFT has received much attention because of its ability to execute Visual Basic Scripts (VBS) attached to or embedded in the body of an email message. While this ability has the potential of achieving some of the goals of the present invention, it has one major disadvantage. The recent interest in MICROSOFT OUTLOOK and VBS was spurred by the outbreak of several extremely damaging “viruses” or “worms”. These Visual Basic Scripts attached to email destroyed files on the email recipient's hard drive and spread by sending copies to all of the email addresses in the recipients' address books. At the present time, the only sure way to prevent damage by malicious Visual Basic Scripts is to alter the “preferences” of OUTLOOK so that the ability to execute Visual Basic Scripts is disabled.